Slashdot Mirror
UK Government To Terminate File Sharers' Net Access
An anonymous reader writes "New plans published by the UK Govt show that they hope to terminate internet access for people suspected of breaching copyright by file sharing. Under the proposed new laws ISPs who fail to enforce the policy will face prosecution in the courts. Users falling foul of the new law will be subject to a three strike policy: First suspected instance of illegal file sharing they would receive a warning, at the second — a suspension, and at the third they will have their Internet connection terminated. It isn't clear whether users will be prevented from ever using the internet again, or whether simply subscribing to a new ISP will reset the process."
My ISP, Pipex, has already blocked me from using BitTorrent. At first I thought it was just a problem with the server, but when I couldn't download a single Linux distribution I started getting suspicious.
I've fixed it now, but I'm not impressed that Pipex see BitTorrent as a cancer that needs to be cut out, and if anything innocent goes with it, then that's OK because it's for the greater good.
Summation 2
Never heard of public encryption ? You need someone public key to send them data and only them can read it. You can also sign it with your private key so that nobody else could have sent that data. (If you sent them your public key) The problem though is man in the middle. Who can you be sure the public key you've got is their public key and not GOV public key?
Surely they'll have to prove what is it that I'm downloading? As I've already pointed out in another post, my ISP has blocked BitTorrent. I can't download Ubuntu now without beating the crap out of the server. If I encrypt BitTorrent, then I'm able to download the free and legal software that I'm entitled to.
I can see my ISP's point, but they're making my life difficult.
Summation 2
According to TFAs, a consultation paper will be published (BBC says "shortly", Times says "within months"). (These are Government papers to seek out opinions, which anyone can respond to.)
Perhaps if a few thousand people respond to that as well as complaining on the Internet, it may help stop such laws (not that the Government is obliged to listen to consultation responses, but it's one possible way of opposing new laws, and makes it harder for the Government to claim there is public support).
I think you mean the UK is said to have no written constitution. It sure as hell has a constitution, which mostly consists of existing case law. Funnily enough most of this is actually written down, but not in one single document. This has advantages and disadvantages - it's more flexible than the formal US constitution (this is both the advantage and disadvantage).
You might also want to point out that this would turn the ISPs into police and give them some of the powers of police. Policing should stay in the hands of government. If the government really wants to police this they can follow proper legal procedures for establishing a wire tap, proving guilt, etc. It is a very slippery slope allowing ISPs to monitor traffic and make decisions based on what they see in the traffic. What if they decide to start monitoring MP's email and publish interesting tidbits?
A better answer is for the content industry to come up with a new business model. Obviously the world has changed and their old one doesn't work anymore.
The next generation of filesharing is already here and working well: Freenet.
Freenet has totally encryption connections between peers, and although your direct peers can see the data packets going between them and you, they don't know if you are initiating them yourself, or just routing for another node in the network. And if even that is too risky for you, you can restrict your direct peers to a list of people you know and trust (aka: darknet).
If you tried Freenet a year or two ago and found it slow or difficult to use, try it out again. There are thousands of users now and a lot more filesharing, and speeds, memory usage and user-friendliness have improved dramatically.
The closest EFF equivalent in the UK is the Open Rights Group (ORG).
well, that's another thing... It's secret, of course, and maintained by a single government official. Some people whose ISPs use the list have made an incomplete list of blocked sites simply by trying different addresses out and writing down the ones that redirect to the police notice that the site has been blocked. But in any case, in principle the list is not public knowledge, the police will not discuss the contents of the list at all, and so far it has seemed that if a site containing no illegal material should end up on the list... Well, too bad.
.fi will be shut down and the operators prosecuted. Indeed, it is strange that the police would choose to ignore a crime and instead of investigating, just block the site. Or are they admitting there is nothing illegal about lapsiporno.info, but blocking it anyway?
In fact, most recently the police have added lapsiporno.info to the list, which is a site criticizing the filter list and maintaining a list of known blocked sites. The block came into effect after the maintainer decided to test the limits of the law and added the option to view the sitelist as a list of direct links instead of just seeing the URLs typed out. The police won't comment on any specific site on the filter list, but they do say that the law enables them to block sites containing illegal pornography with minors, or sites linking to such sites. The text of the law actually seems to contain no such provision about linking, and also states that the filtering is to be applied only to sites based outside Finland, presumably with the idea that sites in
My ISP doesn't fortunately use any filtering, and the usual method of bypassing the ISP's DNS servers will work, but still. Interesting times.